1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to electronic music synthesizers using stored samples of one or more instruments to play a desired composition. In particular, the invention comprises a flash-memory based stored-sample electronic music synthesizer.
2. Background Information
Since their commercial introduction in the 1950s, a variety of electronic music synthesizers have been developed and used. Early synthesizers were largely analog in nature, and provided tonal output by operating on basic waveforms such as sine waves, sawtooth waves, rectangular waves, and the like. With the advent of digital signal processing, music synthesizers increasingly turned to digital techniques to construct desired sound patterns. One common technique was additive synthesis, in which the basic Fourier constituents of a desired sound are assembled to create the sound. Another technique used stored samples of actual sounds, such as that of a violin, a piano, a horn, etc., and manipulated these samples, such as by changing their amplitude, frequency, phase, duration, etc., to provide an output.
Stored-sample synthesizers are capable of high quality reproduction of desired sounds but, to do so, typically require substantial quantities of fast memory to both store the large number of samples required for a quality instrument and to provide those samples at a sufficient rate for playback. One approach that has been proposed to address this problem is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,008,446, issued Dec. 28, 1999 to Van Buskirk et al. and entitled “Synthesizer System Utilizing Mass Storage Devices For Real Time, Low Latency Access of Musical Instrument Digital Samples”. This system proposes to store the sample data on a mass storage device such as a hard disk and to play the samples back using the fast but expensive random access memory (RAM) of a host computer. Substantial amounts of RAM are required in such a system, and the cost of the system is thereby significantly increased. Thus, the proposed system does not satisfactorily address the problem.